


Come Back

by Lothiriel84



Series: Madness & Extinction [2]
Category: The Bunker (Podcast)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Grief/Mourning, I Don't Even Know, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Minor Character Death, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 07:42:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18734629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lothiriel84/pseuds/Lothiriel84
Summary: But I always thought if I remade the world, then you'd come back.





	Come Back

He lit his fifth cigarette of the day, the painstakingly hand-drawn calendar hanging on the wall of his room glaring mockingly at him – red-circled date and everything.

Just last week, they had to bury two of their colleagues; first John, fallen victim to a faulty generator, then Jerry, who had apparently decided he’d had enough of it all. He’d been the one to discover Jerry’s body, and on the morning of his own birthday, too. Not that it mattered, of course – the last time anyone had celebrated his birthday was the week before his wife died, and he’d never been that big on anniversaries anyway.  

(With the exception of this one, of course – he might not remember the sound of her laughter, nor the way her face lit up when she smiled, but he was damned if he was going to let himself forget the day when she was taken away from him once and for all.)

With Jerry, it had been surprisingly painless – straightforward, even; he’d pocketed the empty bottle of pills before anyone could see it, put a match to the note that had been left on the nightstand. Afterwards, when the body had been disposed of and his two remaining roommates herded back to the safety of their underground bunker, he’d made them all coffee and retreated to the privacy of his own room, where he’d spent the rest of the evening polishing the gun he kept in a box under his bed. Someone clearly had to take charge, before they all succumbed to slackness and apathy; and neither Dave nor Tom could be trusted with defending this last preserved bulwark of the Old World against the horrors of the nightmarish present that was their new reality.

(Looking down the barrel of his gun made all the more tempting by the red mark on his calendar, and yet, he would not be as lazy as Jerry, or any of the others for that matter.)

The Old World might have gone up in flames, leaving little more than a thick black layer of radioactive dust in its wake, but they still had a duty to carry on as normal. They were Happiness Inc. employees first and foremost, and the fact that the all-powerful corporation, too, was nothing but smouldering ashes was yet another irrelevant detail in the big scheme of things.

(Sometimes, in those brief interludes when he succumbed to a fitful sleep, he could almost hear her calling from across a barren plain punctuated with carcasses of long-extinct creatures; then the dream invariably dissolved, like volcanic ash slipping through his fingers, and he was fully conscious, again.)


End file.
